Dhadkan of India

NOKIA N93 was introduced in Q1 of 2006, quite a while ago now. N93 has twister form factor. Nokia N93 is declared to be a high end multimedia phone. This phone does not have a JOYSTICK. The Nokia N93 is based on Symbian OS 9.1 S60 Third Edition UI.

Dimensions and weight

The new Nokia N93 weighs about 180 gms which happens to be very heavy compared to other smart phones. It sizes 118 x 55.5 x 28 mm clearly making the phone pretty bulky to fit into just any pocket.

Display

The EXTERNAL display (1.1 inch) of the Nokia N93 is mounted on the front panel has a resolution of 128x39 pixels with a TFT offering 65K colours. The display features a standard bar with the basic indicators, a music player indicator and also shows current time in stand-by mode. The screen however does not show the image of the caller.

The INTERNAL display of N93 is 2.4 inches in diagonal ….which apparently happens to be the biggest in the market …At least for now!! It has a resolution of 240x320 pixels (QVGA).The N93 screen displays 262K colours along with a nice sun protection glass.

Nokia has definitely done an amazing job when it comes to the display of N93, giving out clear and brilliant color and images. The back lighting also seems flawless.

Memory

The Nokia N93 has a RAM of 32 MB and an operational memory of 50 MB.

The phone comes along with a 128 MB mini SD-card and can support up to 2 GB memory cards as well. The memory is not all that great considering the high end usage you would want to put the phone to it would have been better with a larger memory.

Data Transfer

The N93 package includes USB cable that can be connected to the PC in 3 modes -mass storage (no drivers required in this mode), PC suite (standard mode) and Picture Bridge (direct printer connection).

Nokia N93 comes along with a Video Connectivity cable CA-64U.The display comes on both the handset as well as your T.V screen. The main use of this cable is to view multimedia but it can also be used for various other tasks such as playing games, browsing menu, to see presentations and office documents. The phone also gives you a display geometry option of 16:9 or 4:3.

Besides the cable you can also carry out the above mentioned task via Wi-Fi (the handset has IEEE 802.11g Wi-Fi support) i.e. provided you have a P.C or a special multimedia center that supports Wi-Fi.

The handset also supports DTM (Dual Transfer Mode) which allows the transference of voice and data in GSM/EDGE networks both at the same time. In case your operator does not support DTM you still have EDGE B class, multi slot class 32 to transfer data.

Bluetooth module version v1.2 supports the following formats: Basic Printing Profile, Generic Access Profile, Serial Port Profile, Dial-up Networking Profile, Headset Profile, Hands free Profile, Generic Object Exchange Profile, Object Push Profile, File Transfer Profile, Basic Imaging Profile, SIM Access profile and Human Interface Device Profile. The greatest drawback of the Bluetooth though is the fact that it can not support A2DP profile (no stereo headset...!). The phone also features an infrared IrDA Port.

The OMA DRM 2.0 and DRM from Microsoft offer full support to the handset leading you to easy synchronization of media files on your PC and phone.

The browser has a fine speed although it remains some few seconds being the opera browser. You can also use several applications at the same time. The major disadvantage being that, it does not optimize its page content to fit the devices capabilities. Therefore it might be pretty heavy on your pocket unless your operator supports unlimited data transfer.

The device also supports Universal PnP standard (UPnP).The Phone is packaged with a DVD with software like Nokia PC Suite, Life blog, Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition, Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0, Home Media Server software.

Battery

The Nokia N93 uses a Li-Lon BP-6M battery capable of 1100 mAh and comes along with a Nokia travel charger AC-4 and Nokia charger adapter CA-44.

According to Nokia the battery is supposed to give 3.7 hours of talk time in WCDMA networks and 5.1 hours in GSM networks; with an expected stand-by time of 10 days. It should take a little above 2 hours for you to recharge the battery completely.

Camera

The N93 has a Carl-Ziess lens with 3.2 megapixel resolution accompanied by auto focus and a 3x optical zoom (which actually happens to be only 2.7333 x).It has a focal range of 2.5 to 12.4 mm. The camera has an LED flash and an effective macro mode. However under high resolution and indoor conditions the noise is going to be very prevalent in your pictures.

The view finder application can only operate is landscape mode. The camera also has other settings like different shooting modes, white balance, exposure value, color effects, color saturation, flicker cancellation etc. There is also a wise range of scene selection like portrait, landscape, sport or night portrait and one can also define their own scene settings.

When the phone is unfolded there is a second CIF camera used to make video calls. The camera has a flash model which allows you to hold video calls even in the dark.

The Video function of the N93 is said to have DVD like video recording with a maximum resolution of 640x480 pixels and a minimum of 320x240 pixels at an amazing 30 frames per second and 15 frames per second respectively.

The phone has two micro phones one of each side of the body in order to give stereo like audio. One can zoom even during taking videos but the sad part here is the video also records the sound of the zoom in order to avoid this sound one has to deactivate the optical zoom and rely only on the digital zoom. Duration of the video records depends only on the available memory space.

The LED flash is not very powerful neither useless both in the case of taking images or videos. The image stabilizer is also another disappointment.

Ring tones

The N93 operates 64 polyphonic MIDI, WMA ringtones as basic. It supports formats like eAAC+, AAC+, M4A, MPEG-4 ACC LC, LTP, MP3, AMR-NB, AMR-WB.

Other Features

The Phone has Hot Swap for sim cards. Nokia N93 has a tutorial that explains to you the main functions of the phone. In the offline mode when the sim card is not inserted the phone can still provide WLAN and Bluetooth connectivity.

The phone also has a Real player, flash player and a Built-in radio with visual radio upgrade; the radio supports 87.5 to 108 MHz diapason along with 76 to 90 MHz however it lacks RDS.

The Nokia N93 also has quick office where you can view the files but cannot make any changes. Adobe acrobat is also present. The N93 has dual clock and a calendar where in you can assign meeting, anniversary, memo and to-do tasks in the calendar.

Handset has two preinstalled games snakes (3D) and card deck.

Phone supports multiple email accounts.N93 supports POP3 and IMAP4 protocols.

On entering Log application you can find a call records, data transfers and sessions and WLAN connections taken place in the previous 30 days. It has a voice recognition system for voice dials and opening applications.

Positives

Nokia N93 has among the best displays with amazing color and image details.
The phone gives extensive connectivity in all dimensions be it connecting it to your T.V or P.C to play games watch videos or open applications.

The phone takes better videos compared to other smart phones in the market.

The phone has amazing speaker and its sound quality is also brilliant.

The keypad is very comfortable and easy to use.

Negatives

The Nokia N93 is quite bulky when it comes to weight and size.

The external screen does not show the image of the caller.

The phone also is pretty expensive.

The browser does not optimize the opened page with the handsets capabilities and is also a little slow.

The memory is not good enough and you might just run out of it while taking videos.

The battery only last up to two days even in the case of optimal users and it takes over 2 hours in order to recharge completely.

The picture quality is not that great and the optical zoom produces a buzzing sound while recording videos.

The Symbian 9.1 technology used is compatible with older version applications.

The voice records can only be 60 seconds long even after the phone having a large RAM.

It maybe a great device but it fails to be suitable for everyday use.